The other day in prayer a person we know received the image of two hands as from a witch stirring a cauldron.

This seems to be what is occurring in our time: evil that has long simmered is being stirred up. It is being brought to the surface. There is a formulation. Something has been "cooked" and is ready to serve. There's a growing and intensifying darkness. There is a feeling that something -- war? a natural event? -- will break soon. There is intensification all around us, even in the weather. Already, for certain, there is all the spiritual warfare. It bubbles to the surface -- is noticed (froth) -- when there are blatant things like the black "mass" that was planned for Harvard.

That, however, was just that: a surface manifestation. While important and even crucial (if it causes us to march forth and now also defeat other incidents of oppression), it's minor compared to the massive upwellings elsewhere. The people of God are under attack. Everyone seems to have some kind of major family issue. The attack is personal and supernatural. It transcends culture. It is entering households, and when such things occur -- at the first sign of it -- we need to immediately halt it by invoking Saint Michael the Archangel, Saint Raphael the Archangel, Saint Gabriel the Archangel, along with Saint George and Saint Benedict, and the special help of Saint Padre Pio and Saint Joseph, with the prayers of Our Lady of Fatima and the intervention, above all, of Jesus (of Divine Mercy).

Let us never be distracted by the blatant and shameful exhibitions of evil.

Let us focus always on the Light (and the light or darkness in our own beings).

Beware distractions.

This is our refuge of hope, our mantra, our "go-to" prayer -- Jesus, Jesus -- in turbulent times, which will become more turbulent. While we fix on a cause célèbre like Harvard, darkness moves powerfully below the radar in our personal lives. This is not to downplay the societal issues. They are startling. Besides the near-travesty at Harvard (which has long been a locus for anti-Christianity), there are the really sobering developments with all the same-sex stuff, as well as all the heterosexual sin -- the blatant immorality -- paraded before us. A player for the Miami Dolphins was suspended the other day for "tweeting" his disapproval and incredulity when he saw a news photograph of a college football draftee kissing his boyfriend in celebration. The offending tweet: "OMG." At the Smithsonian Museum of American History is now a wedding cake (for the year "2008") with two tuxedoed men on top of it. Meanwhile, one can go nowhere without encountering displays of heterosexual lust. What about all the vampire stuff? What about Miley Cyrus? What about the true gunk across the spectrum of our culture?

This too is oppression. Indifference has allowed the darkness to grow to such a point that we are not even allowed to oppose matters that have been against our doctrine since the Old and New testaments! Free speech is disappearing. Freedom in general is. That athletes -- and the rest of us -- can face actual penalties for our views is astonishing. Our refuge is in hope. But we also must face up to the challenge. To hate anyone, no matter what they do or don't do, is a sin. Also bad, however -- deadly, when sin predominates -- is indifference.

Is it approaching the point where we can't -- in other words -- be Christian? It's okay to pray a Muslim prayer but not a Catholic one? Our military -- and our prisons -- must provide pagan chaplains? Monuments to the devil are now proposed for public display?

He is showing his "shameful face" (as the Blessed Mother once said).

Confusion is the initial hallmark of evil. Our society is now tremendously sensitive to child abuse, but terminating the unborn -- even right up to birth -- is legal. This is incredible. Molesting teenagers puts teachers in jail, but displaying young people in lustful ways on television and the internet and inundating them and everyone else with pornography is okay. We believers praise God while sullying -- and often outright destroying -- His Creation. We preach Christ's ways while indulging in wanton materialism. Sister Lucia dos Santos powerfully called it a "diabolical disorientation.

There is hatred -- extremism -- on all sides. The rancor in public discourse, liberal or conservative, is from darkness. The very ministry of exorcism is an act or love, or should be.

"In reality, war does not begin when people start shooting at one another," noted an Orthodox archpriest the other day. "It begins when certain convictions, upsurges in awareness, or news darken people’s reason and they stop seeing what is most important in those near them. They stop understanding that within the person near them – or not near them but, relatively speaking, 'on the other side of the barricade' – there is much more to love than to hate."

Let us always keep that in mind. There is good in most people.

But still, it doesn't diminish what those folks at Harvard were about to do, which was appalling. It was also a spiritual peril (even if they are too blinded by worldly intellect to see it). "You do not believe because you are not part of my sheep,” the Holy Father said during his homily at daily Mass Tuesday (5/13/14). “You do not believe because you are not of the people of Israel. You have left the people. You are in intellectual aristocracy.”

It was once, Harvard was, a seminary. Harvard was founded by Christians! It is an extreme example of how far we have strayed. Unfortunately, it is also an example of the extreme pretense and often waywardness of modern overpriced academia. Excuse us for the candor.

Enough, however, is enough.

How terrific: we stopped a black "mass" -- through prayer, through protest, through Eucharistic Adoration -- right there in Boston.